Black ink sketch of a mountain range above the script words "the mountains are calling", shown as a flash design on a white background with no body placement visible.

Mountain sketch with script quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A loose pencil-style sketch of a range of four mountain peaks in black, with soft feathered shading on the slopes and small specks of ink around the outline. Below the peaks, the words "the mountains are calling..." are written in a flowing cursive script in black. The design is centred on a plain white background with no colour and no skin visible.

Lettering Mountain Peak Script Quote Landscape Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top has three poles left, and from the centre ring you can count the holes where the others used to stand. Aldous sold the elephant to a dairy farm outside Ludlow in March, and since then the canvas has sagged over the sawdust like wet brown paper. You are patching a tear in the safety net by the light of a camping lantern when the post van drops a catalogue through the flap. It is glossy and smells of someone else's money, and somebody has folded it open at a photograph of a snowbound ridge.

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Your mother had a saying about the mountains, that they called to anyone who had stopped looking up. She said it every time the wagons turned north out of Wales, and she was usually right about the weather. Aldous finds you at dusk with the contract for the winter quarters in Hereford, a pen already uncapped, and talks about the new season as if the lorries will not need new tyres. You nod in the right places. Your hands keep working the needle through the mesh, in and out, the way you learned at nine.

When he has gone you walk the perimeter with the lantern, past the cages with their doors propped open, past the trapeze swinging on its one rope. The ridge is a dark line against the last of the light, four peaks, the middle one notched like a broken tooth. You have never climbed any of them. You have only ever looked up from the sawdust and calculated the drop.

At the gate you leave the lantern burning on the empty ring so Aldous will see it from the lane. Then you fold the brochure into your back pocket, shoulder the net and walk north, the hedges pale on either side, and nobody watches you go.